Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Saturday, April 1, 2017

I sat with my back
to the large window at the rectangular table in the room where my
family took our meals. My father sat at the head, a direct view
outside. “Oh, look, there's a squirrel, “ he would say, and I
would twist around and look out and he would reach over a take a
teaspoonful of my ice cream. And I'd turn back, no squirrel and less
dessert, feeling fooled and shamed and consistently gullible. Now I
do not trust easily, I do not hope, disappointment is too painful.

But when we, we,
everyone, on January 21, spontaneously gathered in protest, marched
and hugged and gathered and shared, I did think that perhaps we were
ready to update this very sluggish and unresponsive governance
system we endorse. I thought: we are here, we have critical mass,
what an amazing result from this presidential election. I had
expectations.

And I was wrong.
And my sadness hurts, is becoming despair. A playbook of tools and
techniques that have guided us to this point, this point of system
failure, that playbook like a magnet has captured all the individual
filings, the energy, and focused it on shifting the electeds balance
scale. Mottos and initiatives about defeating the other - swing
left, block, impeach, sue, 50% + 1 … reward action now, and in lock
step, and reflection, well, maybe later, maybe not at all. Here in
Santa Cruz, we have five indivisibles, regressing to the mean. I
know, I know, introverts just feel alienated, and extroverts aren't
pushed to reflect more deeply.

The Women's March, a
careful balance of collective values and personal engagement has
been turned into structured choices, channeling the energy into
grooves exhaustively well-worn, for instance subsuming the huddle I
was part of from reflection into already defined activity and here
the local women's march leaders broke away from the national values,
muted the international women's day history, the garment worker women
burned alive in the Triangle Fire, … We lunched.

One nation
indivisible, indivisible indeed, stuck together in a massive clump of
insistent perpetuating dysfunction. Phoning and signing and posting
and liking … rallying with rules about what to wear, what to say,
how to say it. while leaders order ...

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

There's a report on
Facebook that Granite Rock Construction, based in Watsonville, CA, is bidding on the anti-immigration wall that
has been proposed. Please don't. We hope Santa Cruz will have sanctuary cities and
a sanctuary county, in deed even if not in law. Immigrant labor is
essential to agriculture which a bedrock of this community's economy,
as it is to the construction industry, your industry. Granite has a
good reputation; ethics are featured on your home page. Just say no;
don't bid.

Utilitarian cost-benefit analyses bend and stretch ethics until they obscure the values of our community, elide our relationships with each other, and dissolve the social bonds on which concepts of state and governance are built.

Yes, you are responsible for fiscal stability. And you also must set an ethical, honorable dignified example that reflects the deeply held social values of we who have elected you ...honesty, caring, family, service, fairness, ...

Because this is not really about illegality and crime and lack of documents. It is about equity and goodness and doing what in all our hearts we know is right.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Inequality has been written into the DNA of civilization ever since humans first settled down to farm the land. Throughout history, only massive, violent shocks that upended the established order proved powerful enough to flatten disparities in income and wealth. They appeared in four different guises: mass-mobilization warfare, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics.

I note that of these four, if warfare becomes nuclear warfare, the rest doesn't matter, and if not, it won't create a global shock; revolutions have been and will be quickly suppressed -- tech monitoring, armored tanks, ... ; medicine is stopping epidemics before they are catastrophic, and maybe we are now experiencing US state collapse.